In rayless majesty now stretches forth
Her leaden sceptre o’er a slumbering world.”
and whose lines, “Procrastination is the thief of time,” “At thirty man suspects himself a fool,” and “All men think all men mortal but themselves,” have become household words. Then there was “Tom Warton,” of whom Johnson said that he was the only man of genius he knew that had no heart. In one sense the remark was perhaps true. Although he was eminently sociable and genial, he seems, from his writings, to have been free from those amorous perplexities in which most poets are involved. But he had a fine imagination, great power of expression, and a considerable vein of humour. Next came poor Collins, who died insane. His father, a hatter, determined, like Sugden the barber, to give his son the very best education. Collins was a strange, fantastical fellow, though not unworthy of the feather he wore in his cap. He became a demi of Magdalen College, Oxford, and wrote three odes—to Evening, to the Passions, and on the Death of Thompson—never surpassed in the English language. Truly the tree of knowledge was here hung with golden fruit. Many other eminent men have issued hence to adorn the Church and State, whose solid acquirements must not cause us to undervalue the gifts of Sydney Smith, another Wykehamist, who “could make not only the guests and servants, but even the portraits laugh.”
School Fare.
Warton in his panegyric on ale, and in the affection he practically showed for it, may have been influenced by the remembrance of the joyous drinks of his school life. He says:—
“Let the tender swain
Each morn regale with nerve-relaxing tea
Companion meet for languor-loving nymphs;”
and adds that he prefers a “material breakfast,” consisting of a crust and tankard of ale. As late as seventy years ago the boys continued to have beer for breakfast, indeed that, and that only, was allowed them liberally. Winchester seems to have been long in forgetting the good old Saxon times when each alderman consumed two gallons of beer at a sitting. As for the boys’ dinner, what between fagging, and the seniors having the first cut at the joint, the juniors often had none—vegetables, never. When the square bits of board were their only plates, they were certainly not indulged with gravy. No wonder that they heartily sang the “Dulce Domum” in the college meads when the time came for them to disperse for their summer holidays.
